Do you find it ironic that the two major political candidates and their parties each rail against and denounce a “rigged system” but went ahead and rigged their own respective conventions for a certain outcome?

~~~

When someone cuts in front of you in the grocery store line (as happened to me this past weekend) and then looks the other way pretending that no such thing ever happened, well, that is pretty much what happened at the Republican National Convention. Conservatives were approaching their turn to speak during regular order and in come Trump supporters and the RNC Rules Committee between them and order.

Dissenting Conservative voices were kept from speaking while those who got their “way“ looked the other way as if nothing happened. This type of strong arm bullying tactic, often used by supporters of banana republic dictators, is being employed to “Make America Great Again!”

The Rep party has become diluted with a Victim Tribe so large that it will never be the same. This tribe includes the likes of the KKK’s former leader David Duke because Duke agrees with Trump or, better, Trump thinking matches Duke’s thinking.

The GOP, in forcing the nomination of a reality TV persona, could have just as well nominated Kim Kardashian. Kardashian has been successful at what she does and she knows how to market her herself just like Trump Towers. And Kim Kardashian also knows how to negotiate a deal to get what she wants. And Trump is only a hair to the right of her politically, if one were ever able to put a fork in Trump’s waffling values.

Trump’s The Art of the Deal is effectively about getting what you want at any cost to others. And that is exactly what America’s victim tribes are all about. So enter Trump, the “negotiator” who gets what he wants. This time he is saying, in effect, that American values are negotiable in order to “win.”

“I would renegotiate so much of everything.” — Donald Trump

With the convention of the New Progressive Right (fka, the Republican Party) mercifully behind us now and the Democratic National Convention upon us we can clearly see that both 2016 Presidential Campaigns offerings are bestial bones thrown out to the Victim Tribes who stand barking before the altar of government.

Who are the Victim Tribes? Those who have a certain grievance, who are hashtag myopic; those who demand attention and some form of protection provided by government. The Victim Tribes gather around the Twitter trough and feed off of each other’s misery. Daily we are inundated with their melodrama.

Added 7-28-2016: Here is a recent example of the Tribalist’s Litany of Demands. It is delivered using the Rhetoric of the Perennially Aggrieved and Ungrateful and of the SJW Flag-wavers in the Long March of Cultural Marxism. These are the ones who are held “hostage” to “all forms” of injustice within the world’s freest nation:

Presumptive Green party presidential nominee Jill Stein appeared at the Occupy DNC rally across from CIty Hall in Philadelphia today (or at the “Bernie Sanders rally” as one cop put it) to speak before a cheering crowd full of Bernie Sanders supporters and other activists.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” Stein said, quoting Frederick Douglass, “and we are that demand.”

Stein told the crowd that they stood for “economic justice, for racial justice, for workers justice, for climate justice, for indigenous justice, for women’s justice, for LGBTQ justice.”

“We will be a unified movement, an unstoppable movement,” she said, “because we are for all the forms of justice.” She criticized the mainstream for trying to divide and conquer the crowd. “They would like us to be a movement to stop fracking over there, and a movement to stop police violence over there, a movement to stop deportation over there,” Stein told the crowd. “We need to be all of those movements, all together, that’s how we’ll stop the unstoppable.”

…

Stein also called for an “emergency jobs program to end the crisis of climate change,” healthcare as a human right, a “welcoming path to citizenship,” and an end to police violence and student debt. (emphasis added)

Long before the petty over-leveraged and unhinged jejune shtick of a life Trump received a majority popular vote during the primaries for saying nothing of import I left the Republican Party. I could see that the RNC was no longer a party for conservatives and certainly not for Christians. As a Christian who is politically a self-governing classical liberal, I cannot align myself with the Moral Relativism Platforms of either the DNC or the RNC.

This November I will vote down ticket. I will not vote for Trump or Hillary. I will vote down ticket for the Conservatives who are still left out there, any who are like Ted Cruz. By all accounts Ted Cruz is a Conservative and one who will keep his word while seeking to honor God and our country’s Constitution. It was Cruz who stood before the RNC barbarians and told those who had ears to hear, “Vote your conscience.”

Sadly, the conscience of the many has become calcified due to persistent media inflammation and a lack of Living Water.

O Radiant Dawn – James MacMillian

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton

*****

“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
*****
“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
*****
“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
*****
To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
*****
“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
*****
Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
*****
If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
*****
“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
*****
“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
*****
Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
*****
“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
*****
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
*****
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
*****
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
*****
“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
*****
God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
*****
From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
*****
“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
*****
One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
*****
“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
*****
God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
*****
“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
**
“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
*****
“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
*****
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
*****
“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
*****
This is what the LORD says:

“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’

-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
*****
“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
*****